Re: [PATCH] sched_clock: fix jiffie fallback clock

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Wed Sep 17 2008 - 15:10:50 EST



* Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> David pointed out that the default sched_clock() fallback is broken in
> that it wraps too soon. Fix this by using the 64 bit jiffie value so
> that we're large enough to overflow properly.
>
> Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@xxxxxxxxx>
> CC: David Howells <dhowells@xxxxxxxxxx>

FYI, -tip testing found bootup hard-lockups today on 32-bit
testsystems.

I've bisected it down to this change. After some head-scratching and an
hour of debugging, it turns out that this aspect:

> @@ -46,10 +46,8 @@ u64 native_sched_clock(void)
> * very important for it to be as fast as the platform
> * can achive it. )
> */
> - if (unlikely(tsc_disabled)) {
> - /* No locking but a rare wrong value is not a big deal: */
> - return (jiffies_64 - INITIAL_JIFFIES) * (1000000000 / HZ);
> - }
> + if (unlikely(tsc_disabled))
> + return (get_jiffies_64() - INITIAL_JIFFIES) * (NSEC_PER_SEC/HZ);

is the buggy one: it calls get_jiffies_64() which does:

seq = read_seqbegin(&xtime_lock);

that's not a very wise thing to do within xtime-locked sections - and we
do call cpu_clock()/sched_clock() in a number of xtime-locked sections.

So i've zapped this commit for the time being, this needs to be solved
differently.

Ingo
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